On the Web

Profile Information

Former owner of a 15-person SEO agency, Ephricon. Sold the agency in 2013 and am now building an "un-agency" that builds and markets a variety of different e-commerce stores and other web-based businesses, all of which we own outright. Visit http://www.netfocusmedia.com/ or http://www.modernindustrial.com/ for more.

Full Name

Jon Payne

Display Name

jonpayne

Job Title

President

Company

Net Focus Media

Location

Charlotte, NC

Favorite Thing About SEO

It levels the playing field

Blog Comments & Posts

Good stuff as always Wil...We've taken a fairly cautious approach to Disavow. We push REALLY hard on link removals first - hunting down the webmasters, and doing whatever we got to do to make it happen. It's easier for sites with lots of directory links or paid blogroll text links. It's near impossible for the spam blog networks like old Build My Rank types of sites, b/c no one really owns them and/or they purposely don't want to be found. I'm with you here, it's not fun and not how I'd like our team to be spending their time.All of the information Google has put out about the Disavow Tool is super confusing. It's still not clear to me if the tool actually does cause Google to de-value those links for a given site in some automated way, or if it's just like a formal hand washing that you couple with a reinclusion request and as such the devaluation is more manual in nature. I certainly tend to think the latter, but then I'll find some video where they outline the timelines for processing the requests and when they "take effect", making it sound like the submission itself actually "does something" other than just supporting a reinclusion request.The only saving grace here is that I believe we're still in this in-between time. I feel like a year from now we'll be talking about this sort of thing a lot less than we are now. Right now, Penguin is still relatively new and the change in link building tactics for the masses is still fairly recent, so there is still a lot of mess to clean up.

Fantastic post Dr. Pete! Each point you made I was agreeing with as I read it - thinking to myself "when I comment I'll tell him I especially agreed with #X point". The problem is I can soooo relate to each one.

So after re-reading the post again, I think #3 and #6 are the ones I see most notably every day. I've been running an SEO agency for going on 9 years now. I can tell you that raising prices (each time we've done it) has been about the best thing we ever did. But it's not all just raising your rates. There is also something to be said for raising your scope levels.

Generally speaking, it's more efficient to have 5 clients each paying $2,000 than to have 10 clients each paying $1,000. With each client there is a minimum level of administrative involvement - invoicing, reporting, meetings, etc. and generally those do not increase proportionately to the involvement. In order words, if it takes me 15 minutes a month to write up and send out the invoice for a $1,000 client, it does not take me 30 minutes to do that with the $2,000 client. It's still 15 minutes. So as you increase scope levels you can find some efficiencies in overhead and administrative costs. I've found that when we bill client A for 4X the number of hours as client B, we may have more email communications with them but its not 4 times that. It's 1.5 to 2X.

So again, as the "scope" increases the net effect is typically that less time is spent on administrative activities and auxiliary activities as compared to the time spent actually doing SEO or delivering your service.

As per #3 - the hidden costs of the "self employment tax", etc. This couldn't be more true. There was one year when I went from being an employee to self-employed and in being self-employed I made roughly the same income as I did the prior year as a W2 employee. My tax rate, however, was quite a bit higher given the second half of the employment tax. All of these deductions that people fantasize about are nice in theory but I have yet to see them in practice. For certain industries it might make sense... if you are a traveling salesman that drives all day you can effectively realize a very nice deduction by expensing your car or reimbursing yourself for miles. For most SEO's who likely do most of their work remotely and don't drive in the car all day the actual impact of this deduction is pretty minor compared to the employment tax, etc.

On another note, I like your discussion of pitching revenue and sales instead of rankings. Indeed, we've been doing that for years and it proves more effective. You are alining your work with their metrics more closely than if you talk about rankings.

That all said, I don't think its really about HOW you are pitching your service to that leads to hire budgets and billings, but rather WHO you are pitching it to. Once you start "selling" conversions and revenue rather than rankings, you tend to attract different clients both in terms of the types and sizes of company, and the position of the buyer inside that company. The lower level IT director or marketing manager wants rankings. The CEO or VP of Business Development wants sales. And that latter group has a larger budget.

Neil - Great post here. I was excited when I saw the title and even more so when I saw your photo next to it.

I've run an SEO agency since 2003. For the first 5 years or so I didn't really want to grow it. I basically wanted to be an independent SEO consultant with a few assistants. Over the past two years, I decided to truly make it an "agency", which means as the owner/president my job is now much less about doing SEO, and much more about managing a business - sales, marketing, hiring and putting systems and processes into place.

My goal has never been to run the largest SEO agency around, and I've never evaluated how "successful" my agency or other agencies are based on just profit. Certainly we are in business to make money, but if profit is the sole determinant than Yodle is pounding all of us. I won't accept that they are "better" in just about any sense.

I do think you are right though in that iProspect, 360i and other larger agencies (really I'm referring more to large agencies in general and less so these companies specifically) treat it much more like a business that they want to scale. Smaller boutique agencies tend to treat the business more like a form of art or a craft that they take great pride in.

I like to think about Ferrari vs. Toyota here. Or even Ford. Both sell cars. But they are very different products. One is selling a high-performance product at a premium price, and selling very few of them. The other is all about volume and automation.

To that extent, I don't consider my agency as competing with a Yodle or other larger agencies. I would bet the guys at Blueglass and Distilled also view their agencies in a different way than the larger assembly-line type firms.

I don't think their revenue volume is really about their sales aptitude or skills. I think its about the type of business they have chosen to operate. Maximizing total revenue for volume is not everyone's number one objective.

Nice post. This is exactly how I approach sales and it seems to have worked pretty well with a pretty good lead-to-sale conversion rate since circa 2003. Its more fun to "talk about SEO" than to "sell SEO" and, darn it, seems to be more effective too!

Great stuff Tom. I couldn't agree more that the SEO piece is the easy part, its the managing of processes, people, timelines, etc. that generally provide the biggest challenge. As such, I'd say mastery of these latter pieces are just as important as mastery of SEO in order to be a highly-effective SEO consultant.

Randy - I'm not a huge proponent of link building through blogs for various reasons, but I disagree about your assessment. I think there is some reasoanble SEO value here, even though its not my preferred link building activity. I'd like to share three thoughts... at least one of which has already been mentioned above:

1) Why not focus on dofollow blogs? If your objective is building SEO value through links, then only using blogs that nofollow the comments is an obvious mistake here, as the search engines have stated they will not count the link juice from nofollow links. Either comment on both dofollow and nofollow blogs, or just the former (dofollow), but by only commenting on nofollow blogs its no wonder you aren't seeing any juice.

2) How long did you wait before using OSE to see the new links? OSE takes a little while as they have to first reindex the web, and then push that live in an update. In my experience Yahoo Site Explorer updates and shows new links more quickly. I tend to advise giving OSE as much as 3 months before using its data to measure the links. I think you just jumped the gun and looked at OSE too soon after doing your link building.

3) Did you consider trickle-down link benefits? If your comments are particularly good and relevant then they can drive traffic/views from the blog author and other readers (who typically are also web content publishers themselves) and thus a comment on a nofollow blog can still drive traffic that then in turn can lead to new links from other sites that are dofollow.

Are you considering it as something that will help you run a for-profit business? If so, its a legit tax writeoff or "expense". If you aren't doing SEO professionally and rather the membership is more of a personal interest than its not an expense.

I'm guessing that for you - and 90% of those reading this thread - it is a valid expense or write-off. Most of us do SEO in order to generate revenue in some way - either for ourselves as affiliates, or for our clients as a consulting service, etc. In those cases if this membership helps you do a better job its an expense. In fact, so long as it was purchased for that reason, its a legit expense.

Rand - I don't think you "owe" anyone a blog post of this nature as a CEO... but as the primary face and spokesperson behind SEOmoz I think it would be an advisable move - especially as Rebecca was seen by many as the next most recognizable face.

I personally don't care why she left or whatever - that's your deal and that's her deal. Either one of your or both of you made what you believed to be the right decision for your business and self. That's your business.

That said, many people in this community do spend way too much time online, and do treat blog comments, etc. as their social hour (you guys who are the first comment on every post - I'm referring to you). As such, the interest and curiosity is not surprising, and with that comes rumors, etc. I'd think it a good move to spend 30 minutes to present your side and stem such speculation. Again, I don't think you owe anyone this, though.

Good stuff here... would love more hard numbers and graphs here though. Did I just miss them? The Title tag graph was great. I want to see that ALT tag graph!

Definitely understand the disclaimers here - I use this argument all the time with Brand in the TITLE tag. Sure putting the brand first and KW second is not as good purely for rankings as the other way around. That said, if you brand is Nike or something, put that first. From what we've seen, the boost in CTR is worth the tradeoff in pure ranking power. Especially considering most of these household brands already have lots of link juice so they can afford to slightly under-optimize on page elements a bit if it is better for the big picture.

Totally understand correlation vs. causation... any good causation numbers you have here? I think people would be willing to pay / join / link / whatever for that data :) If I had unlimited time I'd take a few months and just rock out tons of totally controlled tests. But alas, I don't have such time. I trust you guys to do a great job of this though...

I want to belive that the "theme" related to your links is a major factor, but I continually see examples where this does not seem to be the case. We continue to pursue themed links as our practice - for traffic, conversions and SEO... but I believe that in actuality the "theme" matters a bit less than most might lead us to believe.

This is the best post I've read anywhere in a good while. We don't always agree, but man do I agree with you here.

Naturally, there are some cases where social media is essentially a piece of a link building campaign, and in that case you can justify the ROI of it quite easily. In that case what you are doing should almost be called "link building" rather than "social media" if you are doing it for the main purpose of building links for SEO benefit. It gets to be a gray area when you are allocating the benefit as 50% branding and networking and 50% link building for SEO.

This all said, while there are specific arguments against your point I believe that you are dead right in the majority of cases. I will easily confess that every hour I spend on social media is probably only 1/3 as productive as every hour I spend doing hardcore keyword research, on-site optimization, link building, etc. But social media is more fun and more immediately rewarding. So I spend way more time on it than I should. Such is my struggle...

The general idea here is controlling link juice from flowing off a page. I'll agree that this is something we want to do, to some extent. Okay, let's work with that.

Using nofollow is the suggestion as a way to control this. Its one method. That said, others have brought up suspicion about whether relying too heavily on nofollow might send an overoptimization signal to the search engines. Fair enough.

So why not take the general idea and use another method?

The most simple would be to simply just not have unnecessary and redudant links to Page B from Page A. Do you need 3 links from Page A to Page B? Maybe. Maybe not. If not, remove the unnecessary ones.

Another idea would be how the links are implemented. You could use Flash to link to pages and that would not lose juice.

Lastly, look at your site-wide navigation and general navigation structure. If you have a 50 page site, do you need to link to all 50 pages from all 50 pages? Maybe not. So don't. Do that for the 20 pages you really are trying to rank, but take those 10 "company information" pages you are linking to from each page and instead of linking to all 10 just link to the 1 main one, which in turn will link to the other 9.

Adam - I'm hiring a few SEO people in the road from you in the northern part of South Carolina - just outside of Charlotte. Know anyone looking for a gig? Preferably someone with "actual experience"??? :)

Apparently a much larger percentage of readers on this site follow the Machiavelli approach, much more so than I would have guessed.

This is a situation of ethics here, and I'm not talking about "ethical SEO", so let's just get that clear.

This is a question of "is it okay to lie about details if you think you can still meet the employer or clients business goals?"

I say no, its not okay.

Sure there is a gray area where omitting some minor details that might get the client sidetracked... and sure there is "selling yourself" by putting forth your best foot and not shining a bright light on your flaws. That is expected. But I do not think we are talking about that gray area here. This seems more clearly on the wrong side.

I'm interviewing two people for an SEO position later today. You can be assured that I'm going to test them out a bit more now than I have in the past when interviewing people. Many people - myself included - are very good interviewers. We can talk like a great sales guy, and really relate to business owners. That said, its very difficult to determine technical aptitude and actual depth of knowledge during an interview. I'm thinking I may have to test people on the spot :)

Okay enough criticism... as I actually like this post and like how Adam worked hard to make himself into what he said he was. Indeed I think a certain amount of "fake it til you make it" is a very good thing. Its about goal setting and working to better yourself. That's nothing but great stuff there.

Darren - I can't believe you just compared yourself to Jesus and no one has ripped you for that yet. That's ridiculous.

All - In general though while I personally would like to know the details behind each and every thumbs up and thumbs down I receive, I do not think it should be required. Perhaps just optional.

If you require it then you are reducing the volume of "thumbs" given and thereby further skewing things. The only people represented in the"voting" process would be people with enough time to justify themselves. I'd never vote. Shoot, just having to log in already reduces my "thumb count" by at least 75%. Without the requirement to explain myself though I vote much more often.

Its hilarious that you guys have hired so many people in the past 2 years, but no one in an SEO consultant role... I'm sure you'll have no trouble finding someone amazing though. Good luck!

Rand - I just took a look at the about and team pages for the first time in while. At one point you defined SEOmoz as a boutique SEO consulting agency (roughly speaking, I don't recall the verbiage) and then lately I've viewed you guys more as a software application provider and publisher serving other SEO agencies... How would you define SEOmoz today? Mostly as a publisher and resource center, or mostly as an agency, or 50/50?

I saw the basic membership includes 4 sites in SEO Analytics and 15 (or 20?) Linkscape report credits. I thought that meant we could only use 4 different sites in Linkscape. I was not familiar with the "SEO Analytics" tool so when I went to upgrade I was associating all those bullet points of features as being specific to Linkscape. I now see that the number of sites for SEO Analytics has nothing to do with Linkscape... it seems like Linkscape is just all about the report credits as your usage quotas.

...so...

MY BAD!

I was totally upset too - b/c under my (mis)understanding of what I was getting too was pretty poor. I interpreted it to mean that at the $79 per month level we could only get detailed reports for just 4 domains. That would have blown. We have way more than 4 clients, and hey I might want a little competitive intelligence there.

Too bad for you guys though that I now comprehend things - I was about to upgrade to the $299 plan just so I could run 1-2 reports a month for 10-15 clients. :)

My concern is not with the 20 / 50 / 125 reports per month. I don't even know how many of those I'll use, but my guess is I'll have plenty.

Instead, my concern is with the number of domains. The "basic" PRO membership is only 4 domains. That's pretty small. I understand its geared towards the "solo SEO".

So what about those who signed up at the original membership level but are more than just a "solo SEO"? I have a relatively "small" 3-person SEO firm. We're not exactly huge players in terms of volume in the industry. We've got about 15-18 clients. Since your cutoffs are 4 / 10 / 25 for domains we'll need to get the "Big Business SEO" account. I sort find it hilarious that a 3-person shop is "big business".

I think part of that is b/c SEOmoz seemed to be doing relatively large-dollar client work before shifting to the subscription service model. Kudos. But there are many firms out there than have 1 to 3 people on staff and have way more than 4 or even 10 client sites.

Any thoughts on this guys? Any more practical way to scale up the number of domains and a bit lower price point?

To be perfectly honest though, I'll pay the $299. I can swing it. But I know about 15-20 other small SEO firms who that would be a prohibitive cost for. Perhaps they can make a cut somewhere else.

Understand that I'm not doubting its worth the cost here, rather just surprised that you offered a discount (free upgrade) to the basic, but not discount (have to pay full price, don't even get the $30 credit) for the mid-level and upper-level packages.

First, very glad to see this tool and excited to use it. My firm was just discussing the other day how beneficial it would be to have a source for web-graph data (links, domains, etc.) other than the search engines which have understandable conflicts in interest associated with sharing such data.

Not Sure...

I've been a Pro Member at the $49/monthly rate for quite a while. I originally joined b/c I had bought one or two "premium" reports and figured it was worth the cost. At the time, what I was buying was "the best" membership plan you had.

Now you guys have added two new membership plans above the Pro one. I understand that I get it for the "grandfathered" rate instead of the $79 or $99 that it will be. I appreciate that. However, I run an agency with way more than 5 clients. The Pro membership seems to have capped my reporting to only 5 clients. Thus, to continue to have access to a higher level of membership I'll need to upgrade... and while this tool is way-cool, there is a pretty big difference between $49 per month and $299 per month.

Question

Is there a discount for existing "grandfathered" members to one of the higher level packages? We effectively are getting a "discount" now on the basic package, though I doubt anyone was looking for a basic package when they signed up long ago. Perhaps a fee of $189 or $199 for the top-end $299 / month package for your existing 3,000 members?

Ann - so true. Some people want to become "popular" in the SEO community in order to get business, and others just see being "popular" as an ends in and of itself.

Participation in blogs, forums, social media, etc. is very time consuming. For those who do a lot of client work and still manage a high level of participation in the SEO community I envy you - its all I can do to not get completely burried with my client work alone. On rare occasion (now) I create 5 minutes to spend reading blogs, etc. though even now I feel like I'm slacking from my "real work".

I couldn't agree more Will... but I'll add that TRUST is not just important to get the sale, even more important after the sale. I've found that a few "early wins" will help build our trust and credibility with a new client... thus giving us more leeway and influence.

If you pose a sitewide redesign on Day 1 with the client, you might face pushback. If you pose that after 2-3 Months whereby you can show your small changes have doubled or triple traffic and conversions, than the client is likely to hand you the keys and say "do as you please".

Now this all said, sales is not the problem for many SEO firms I know... getting the work done and managing the clients/projects is the issue. The business challenges clients face and managing internal politics for them are the hard part, the SEO part is easy.

I will argue that all formal education is always at least 5 years behind the appropriate "real world" education. Its probably more so with fast-moving industries, but even true in more steady fields.

That all said, I think you may just not be looking hard enough.

I personally have a Bachelor's degree in E-Business from Towson. Check out the courses. And I graduated ALMOST 5 YEARS AGO!

Again, its not the most relevant. No they don't teach practical applications of SEO. But then again that's no different than how my roommate who was a Com Sci major couldn't program a lick of code. Lots of theory.

Colleges and Universities are typically places that teach theory and the process of learning more than practical job skills for early-career success.

Trade schools and IT training schools like this one or this one can teach you the nuts and bolts of online marketing, etc. if you want to go that route. Certainly you can also learn it on your own as well.

I've also found that many schools bring in outside professionals to give guest lectures to expose students to the "nuts and bolts". I believe Rand has taught a few, and I've taught about a half-dozen myself. Check out the powerpoint slides (bottom of page) if you like.

I think you are simply expecting the wrong thing from a college (university) education. Its about theory and learning to learn. If you want practical skills consider a trade school or certification program. Its not just you here though, IMO far to many people go to a university seeking "job skills" b/c that is simply the status quo in the US. I would like that to change. We need more technical people with tangible skills.

When Gatorade paid Michael Jordan to promote their product they were paying for his status, authority and credibility to be associated with their product.

Does he really drink Gatorade outside of his arrangement with them? Who knows? Who cares?

When a website owner buys a link from another website owner they are doing the same thing - they are paying to have a site bestow credibility and status unto the other site.

This is no different than the concept of spokespeople as it has existed for many years.

What Google wants to prevent is websites linking ONLY because of payment, and not b/c of relevance.

Is it not possible to have a good, relevant website still purchase a link? Just b/c a site is buying links does not mean its not still a good, relevant site in its own right. I see this as Google just being too lazy to do extra digging.

If a given website wants to cheapen its brand by linking to any crappy site that offers them money than Google should find a way to deal with that - discount the value of the links. But if a good website links to another good website I don't believe this should be discounted simply due to the money involved. Only if indeed its not a relevant link or poor website involved.

Very helpful Jeff. That was informative enough but not too detailed. Kudos.

In the past when I had tried 301s on a larger scale I had gotten the feel that all the "link juice" wasn't quite transferred 100% seamlessly - felt like something was still missing. That said, its been a while so I hope to re-open my mind and be more accepting of 301s instead of harassing clients to keep all the URLs the same no matter what :)

Rand & Others - what is your best guesstimate as to how long after implementing the 301 that you'll be able to notice a rankings boost?

In my experience, 301 redirects for an entire domain can often take quite a while to really "kick in" and typically doesn't go quite as smoothly as it could/should in theory. I don't believe I've experimented much though with just one or a few single pages redirecting to another page on the same domain.

Are we talking days, weeks, months??? Obviously "it depends" but I'm going for a general feel here if you will :)

Second choice??? No way. I just figured I'd bug Rand b/c I expected you'd be busy handling the big money items. He is your assistant isn't he?

Seriously though, excellent thoughts Rebecca. I (like most of us) spend way too much time online as it is, and while written communication is great, an old-fashioned in person conversation has its place too. I find that when I discuss the topic with others we can have a more insightful and productive conversation in an hour than we could do in three hours via email replies, etc. It gives you that back and forth, and hey having a couple drinks ain't bad either!

Truthfully I'm shocked at the overwhelming response our Baltimore/DC group has gotten. We put the page up three days ago and already have 23 people that have signed up. I'm really excited about it.

Naturally I don't expect everyone to make it to an event, but I'd love to get 7 or 8 different viewpoints from people in the area maybe once or twice a month.

I run an agency, and as it is right now most of my SEO-related conversations are with other agencies. I believe there are some different perspectives that in-house SEOs, affiliate marketers, etc. could offer, and so that's another benefit we're seeking here.

No group in your area? Start one up, send a couple of emails to local acquaintences you have and you may be surprised :)

The first is a Cutest Pet Contest by 1800PetMed. This is genious. Getting people to promote their own love for their pet, and their desire for others to validate that. As a result, those people post links to their pet's photo, which happens to be on the PetMeds site. Brilliant. If you can get personal buy in that is key.

The second is this Makeover Dusty game for accessorizing an old-school cell phone. Kudos to them for taking a boring topic and finding a fun angle. Basically you pimp out a 1985 huge boxy cell phone. Kind of fun. Again, get people to promote their own creation and in turn its promoting your own site. The music on that site is golden too. Hilarious old-school stuff.

Anyhow, I know you have lots of posts on link bait, many which I love, but I like how these two games/contests exemplify what you mentioned:

Games need to be entertaining, but shouldn't be overly complex - often the fun is in the simplicity.

So I'm terribly late on this, but let me comment for future note...
I've done maybe 6-7 similar grad school lectures, mostly at Johns Hopkins. I found that at least the first 3 or 4 times I under-estimated the amount of time it would take to give the presentation and also for Q&A. Both were much longer than I expected.
Do (did) you have a time limit to stick to? I generally try to ask for that up-front. Its tempting to want to share everything you know about SEO - but chances are one class session will not allow for that. For the past few presentations I've given I've omitted things like indexing, black hat optimization, etc. purely b/c of time. Rather, I learned that in some cases you must first make the case for search engines (and less occassionally the internet) as a media, and then get to SEO. We in the industry take this for granted, but certainly many people don't view search engines as a channel that can drive meaningful volume.
Thus I typically do something like:
- Growth of internet-driven business and how search engiens fit in to this
- Discussion of basic components of a search engine and their business model (ads vs. organic, etc.)
- What is SEO and how to rank well (keep it high-level)
- What is PPC and how to be successful with it (keep it high-level)
- 2 or 3 Case Studies
- Q&A
Sometimes there will be some Q&A on the fly too. Anyhow, hope this went well for you!

Others have noticed this before, as they've been showing their ad inventory for a while. In some cases it may help their sales, sure. But in some cases it may hurt them.
I've been a long time "white hat" SEO who has been tempted to buy links at various points in time. I've reviewd the TLA site many times, and love the interface. However, the ability for Google to discount and/or penalize these links is what has kept me from getting more serious about potentially purchasing links for clients.
1) Even without showing the URL, they show screenshots and the name of the site. Many times I've spent 15 seconds doing a couple of searches and have been able to identify the sites TLA has inventory for and then I've gathered my own data on those sites, never having purchased though.
2) While TextLinkBrokers may do better to hide this a bit more than TLA, I still think they aren't much better. What is to prevent someone at Google from signing up with TLB using a personal email account so they can see the inventory? Nothing. Why wouldn't / couldn't they do this? Exactly.